[IP] more on Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ted Dolotta <Ted@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 30, 2004 6:27:08 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [IP] Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market
Reply-To: Ted@xxxxxxxxxxx
Having worked very, very closely with Masa Son for over ten years, I
can assure you that this is classic Son: he has pulled off a number of
such stunts to force change in Japan: he decided to essentially *give*
stock to all his employees in the early 1990's, because stock options
were illegal in Japan ("Insider trading," said the government ...);
they no longer are. And the way he forced the government to give him
Japanese citizenship (he was born in Japan, but as a Korean national)
*without* him having to change his last name to an "acceptable"
Japanese surname -- which was the rule in Japan -- is an absolute
classic,
but perhaps too long a story for IP. Son is a real piece of work.
That said, the Business Week article referenced below, and even more
so, the companion interview (Online Extra: Why Son is "Banging the
Table") have been, IMHO, "punched" up a bit: the tone of the two
pieces is a bit over the top, and although his English is very good
(he has a B.S. from UC Berkeley), when I worked with him, Son's
vocabulary did not include words such as "ubiquitous" and
"seamlessly" ...
Ted Dolotta
P.S. And in the interim, SOFTBANK has 4.5 million customers who get
20+Mb/3Mb ADSL, and all the VoIP they can eat, for some $35/month.
NTT & KDDI have been forced to drop their rates, and the users
benefit. And I'm eating my heart out here in the old US of A ...
Begin forwarded message:
From: IKEDA Nobuo <ikedanob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 29, 2004 9:20:58 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: ikedanob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market
Three years ago, Masayoshi Son walked into Japan's communications
ministry and threatened to set himself on fire. A stunt of course, but
he was deadly serious about one thing: He felt regulators were dragging
their feet in forcing Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT
),
the former monopoly operator, to fulfill its legal obligation to
connect
residential customers to the broadband lines of Yahoo! BB, a mainstay
of
Son's Softbank Corp.
Now, Son hopes to transform Japan's cellular market. His plan is to
offer his broadband customers -- most of whom also subscribe to
supercheap Internet telephony -- package deals that include mobile
service, the Internet, and voice calling. That, he says, would help cut
rates for Japanese mobile users, who pay an average of $65 monthly. "I
can guarantee that cell-phone prices will be lower if we come in," says
Son, Softbank's president.
The reshuffling has Son hot under the collar again, but this time he's
not threatening self-immolation. Instead, on Oct. 13 he filed a lawsuit
against the ministry, calling for the spectrum reallocation to be
stopped. "I'm getting smarter," Son says. "It's still business suicide,
but it's better than physically killing myself." Specifically, Son
wants
the ministry to divide the spectrum into three chunks, giving equal
pieces to a newcomer -- which Son hopes will be Softbank -- and to KDDI
and DoCoMo. His argument: Both carriers are already sitting on unused
spectrum, so why shouldn't they face more competition?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906073.htm
While you have too many lawsuits between the FCC and operators, we have
too few suits in Japan. This is the first case that any company sues
the
government over spectrum allocation in Japan's history.
--
Ikeda, Nobuo
GLOCOM, Japan
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